talking to me

in the soft light:
wondering you
and all i see
are eyes so blue
they dazzle me

on Friday night:
two drinks in hand
as you come near
i'm in the band
and playing, dear

for my next toast:
i hear your voice
i watch your lips
i have no choice
my fingertips

want you the most:
across the sea
or in this place
talking to me
ribbons and lace

in the soft light:
wondering you
and all i see
are eyes so blue
they dazzle me

in front of a window with squirrel

a still life sits
in front of a window
opening onto a landscape
where a selfish heart lipstick red with sacrificial eyes
beats on the cheap carpet
hauled home from the local Kmart
by a working salesman in drag.
my only saving grace
except for a single sense of rhythm
is my counterpoint to the kitchen counter
squarely planted upstairs
on the long and narrow desk
under an overhead light
where the intricacies of the pinkest music
keep Big Blue dialing for home.
if i wasn't so shy and short on charm
this austere room with the ballroom door,
a pioneer's face painted over the little knob
with his dim mistress by his side,
would be a popular refuge.
i was never destined to be much of a writer,
but valiantly studied every move by those i hold in high esteem,
which includes the working salesman in drag.
and the confident grey squirrel i watch from my window
has established himself into a budding thief
rapidly and effectively
he can transform himself into a bird and fly away.
he has never asked for a slide-rule,
and refuses to teach me any of his literary tricks.
but still i write,
sitting in front of a window
watching the squirrel steal time,
plus a few sunflower seeds for his journey.

Starting with Something: 2013

dressed like a little Hamlet at
closing time for my New Year's ball
i spent two hours exchanging ideas
about our Empire's rise and fall.
i had combed my hair so neatly;
wore a white shirt with shoes shined,
was barely tempted to wear a disguise
while being wined and dined.
i even made some primitive face
when a figurative lady asked about my art:
mandolins and gramophones
playing music went passing in a cart.
Tipperary was the tune i heard,
the simplest of all the chords;
while handbags and jackets in a pile
surrounded Arab and Chinese swords.
but the Indian guy with the brightest smile
when his brother was about to leave
embraced me with his Buddhist grin
and i felt nothing up his sleeve.
i knew his work from a Russian friend
who regaled me with tales of fire
between rye bread and a tasty leg
which i kept kissing ever higher.
but at midnight there was no emphasis
on the watchman dimming lights
as everyone characteristically
kept pointing out the sights.
so with tie undone and no mockery,
i left an indelible mark;
out the door i went in a hurry
thinking "Man, this is just the start!"

neither women nor oysters

by the summer waves
i watched you touch my cautious hand
as though i were made of glass
and you of apple pie:
two separate things
cut off by a ridge two thousand feet high.
and walking a narrow street
an artist sketched in charcoal our gray-black rocks.
he left his landscape bleak,
so for me there was nothing uplifting
and i found it hard to speak.
ninety more miles we drove
to an epic spot near a newly-planted grove
with a view of the ocean and the town square:
a small eucalyptus-shaded villa on the beach
seemed out of order there.
stranded in little heaps around the harbor
were boats upturned, covered with torn nets and oars
like a female body but not yours,
which i now fear is lost at sea
without any interest
in a final glimpse of me.

the Golden gun

i'm a pauper
but with lots of money:
if you think that's funny
well, i'd say okay.
we're both running away from the Golden gun
little girls and boys,
waiting for the final noise
which will mean we're dead:
some found sunning, some still in bed.
i doubled back,
read the headlines all black and blue.
it was Sunday and i came for you,
but you shook me off
like a button.

O Dark Thirty (not a movie)

0 Dark Thirty
from here to eternity
whether suffering in the countryside
or martyred in the city:
from an alley to the school
it's all the same boat ride you fool!
and neither is more picturesque,
lest
beauty becomes a parody of life.
still eating fancy peas with your knife?
well not in my studio (as in Hollywood, i presume)
is real Truth covered with faceted strokes:
long man-made beasts who clamor for
the sky and the mountains to merge with total war.
and when they do,
i'm reminding you
each blind flower upon hearing about waterboarding
will simply fade and die;
that's why they cry
long before their bloom is over.
rightly, too,
since the fate of any beating heart is often decided
by unwanted water rising in another persons' throat,
and business as usual always smothers the goat!
now darker ages appear
adding black upon our newly fallen cover of white snow.
this is not what i write, but what i know.
i could go on,
talking from dusk until dawn
but i have shamefully little concern about these troubles.

Take The A Train

she waited for the A train
but only knew a little French,
not well enough to know what was going on
around her,
as any avant-garde magazine would say
when it wasn't lying.
and it was almost rush hour, so a small crowd
had already gathered, flipping pages, their tormented eyes looking
up to heaven for answers.
the schedule said the train would be going backwards
and forwards, inside and outside, and some of the cars would be windowless,
some without doors, and that i could bum a ride.
but i didn't want to abandon the Natural world entirely, so resisted
the idea of angels and platform conductors acting polite.
my main worry was just being late for the trip, because
if a new day really was approaching, someone would need to grow
sizable balls, the sort that can give men courage to ride the A train
in any weather, even when the conductor no longer has control.


she = your community/A train = US
rush hour = tipping point
take the AR 15 assault rifle off the open market
ban the sale of the extra large magazines for the ammunition
male political class:  grow balls
women of America:  grow balls
American public:  learn the language of DEMAND action
Cultural imperative:  KNOW what is going on
Otherwise:  the schedule said the train would be taking you for a ride

My Country, 'Tis Of Thee

the big bad gun boomed; it hissed and spit awful bullets
a dangerous dragon tongue of metal and meanness
snaked forcefully forward
and the sound was horribly indiscriminate,
an odor of refined evil spreading over the scattered gummy bears
many who heard the unfamiliar sound didn't know what it meant,
and they died suddenly not knowing what it meant!
if there was any meaning, it has already vanished into the chill
of that sad mid-December morning.
but what is the meaning for the children?
six and seven years old!
six and seven years young!
children dying by their desks without parents for a goodbye embrace
blood and crayons and show-and-tell on the floor
hearts broken after the morning announcement, forever lost in the static
with Barbie pencils and Disney promises and more
screaming inside each classroom without answers for anyone
sufficient for Peace On Earth understanding.
children caught in a desperate moment of madness.
a simple elementary school designed to educate the many for life,
now left with fewer lives and even more questions,
while that vile man continued to boom and hiss his big bad gun,
firing a final fatal hot bullet into his own fatally flawed cold heart.
during his brief visit to a sunny school in Connecticut: 20 children,
12 girls and 8 boys
six and seven years old!
six and seven years young!
murdered
all innocent, pure souls
six and seven years old!
six and seven years young!
the big bad gun boomed
and millions of caring people began to cry.

Landscape with a Bridge

"What a loss for French art!"
the muse inspiring the poet was heard to say
but i didn't believe a word of it
and continued on my way
weeping tears and faking a fit
i sat unsteadily on my throne
until i got used to it.
from here, i saw the dim pupils
dressed fondly in their Sunday best
swarm like angry acolytes
to challenge me to a test:
from a rooftop framed in trees
i heard the bell tower chime
i saw a bridge across a river
and made it uniquely mine.

Passage to (a new kind of) Pictorial Space

the horizon looked like soft tissue
blurring into a small white line
of receding ghost
i could almost make out
your tiny eye still
polished with several layers of glossy illusion
but my view was being drained
several tentative steps at a time, by stairs leading
into an unconventional basement where
a sump pump operated just out of reach
i could hear its' electric motor running and running,
a surprisingly smooth noise flowing
directly from your tiny mouth
i could see you sitting on the supposedly progressive shore,
with body heat escaping from your classical shoulders
as you leaned ever closer to the past
and i saw a nearby rock band plug in their amplifiers
Freddy Mercury was on the Queen stage,
having brought along with him a new kind of leading edge,
previously unpainted and unsung
you must have cared, for you tried to turn down the volume!
and after the show, i watched your arms grow weary trying to fill the
empty seats where the audience once sat,
but no amount of your paint would change the world
you acted surprised, and when your eyes grew larger, i thought there might be hope
i wanted you closer, after all
please don't put things into perspective:
it would only fool my eye into believing something that is not there.

Still Life with Skull (1908)

try listening to the dead man,
the one with a skull
off-center, grieving over a still life!
5 paint brushes in his hand and not a single knife
near a morning window;
the mailman on rounds,
walking slowly to visit Picasso,
found the body hanging in the Bateau Lavoir studio:
androgynous-looking, bizarrely dressed,
it was Karl-Heinz Wiegels,
full of something besides art and himself;
bought from friends or pulled from a shelf.
successive doses of opium, hashish, or ether
and a healthy shot of schizophrenia
in browns, blues, yellows, and red:
no one heard what last words

might have been said.

"merde, merde, merde..."

with her earrings and her cat eyes,
she smiled with an Oriental purr.
Marie Laurencin watched his collar stud
tickling her soft fur.
she leaned beside his well-dressed bed.
he rested while moving fitfully,
very much in love,
poetry filling the air.
his name was Guillaume Apollinaire:
he died of a broken heart and a war wound.
she had all his letters buried
with her in her tomb:
"merde, merde, merde..."

waiting for me

a fireplace flame flickered small by my shoulder
and i was not unpleasantly distracted by the heat,
while the seasoned white oak went about its business of burning a
cozy memory inside my room.
and standing in a languid manner, i walked
to the large window, and from that window
by the hearth i could see a few discarded drawings of utmost delicacy
hidden partially by palm fronds which were not real, yet
evoked a message of wind-blown days from my youthful past:  and i had
a glimpse of a blond boy wearing a dark sweater classically
decorated with stars and half moons across his chest, but it was brief as he was fleet
of foot and also was not real.  i returned his wave, a sudden movement
which might not have been a wave, after all.  Smoke from my chimney
was exciting a neighborhood dog as i could hear the bark coming through
my stone walls, penetrating not only my view but my thoughtful reverie!
outside, there was a grey squirrel chasing dozens of hungry birds
but they quickly returned to an offering of fresh suet and took chairs
when the squirrel left his tail in a fit of pique.  my song birds no longer need forks or
knives or spoons and long ago they did away with their special China, and they
still fly with an athletic grace attributable to long hours of colorful practice in the air.
they do not like to fly against a starlit night sky, or any night sky,
as their eyes work best in the sun and friendly air of daytime.
no frogs remained in the petite pond where the 9 fish reclined
as though waiting for warmer weather on the beach, while a sickly black
male cat stalked the attentive birds in his usual crouch, eyeing his
opportunity for mischief.  a clean-shaven bare-chested man
seemed life-size as he filled the sunflower seed box before
making a quick return to his house, to see if he could find his hiking boots.
i understood all this from my window before returning to the fiery scene,
where i found you waiting for me, with a blueberry in your mouth.

polishing surfaces

but only polishing surfaces,
the cleaning woman and her sculpted chin
scrubbing pots and pans
with her masturbating grin

forever going over the same old ground
up and down and round and round
nary a sound
comes from the deep
which arouses her interest
before her sleep

spending all her free-wheeling time
getting off on a bad start
cheapening her view
with a bone-shaped heart

there might be something noteworthy to do
as she could certainly see over the top
but at certain hours of a certain day
she's back at work with her mop

forever going over the same old ground
up and down and round and round
nary a sound
comes from the deep
which arouses her interest
before her sleep

putting a hand up to her face
like a voyeur for flamboyant scenes
but only polishing surfaces
the cleaning woman with her dreams

forever going over the same old ground
up and down and round and round

etched eye with fertility mask

as an artist, i wanted to shape
her nude form into something more inviting
and starting just
below the forehead and hair,
i imagined her eye etched into the side of her hard head
similar in size to a recently hung masterpiece.
it could arguably be called a visionary slit,
set slightly above the upper lip,
and with full focus on what i was doing,
i made it tower over her neck in the undecipherable form
of a lusty shadow.
but it wasn't until the end of the first summer,
as i watched the profile strengthen
from an initial hint of earthiness on my studio floor,
that i was finally able to come by her side to stretch the waiting canvas.
and i stayed busy during the following nights and days,
adding layers of intrigue and light to a tribal image of her poetic smile,
while providing her an alluring mouth and many perfect fingers.
i wanted to be precise, but without employing too much delicacy,
so i added hash marks and often tilted my head for a better view of her underworld.
when satisfied, i left the lower part of her body behind,
as there was still much work to be done on
her pendulous breasts.
and if i stood her erect, she was as tall as i was;
if she stood me erect,
i wore my fertility mask,
waiting for the paint to dry
when i knew her eye would be completely etched,
as flat as a tongue and equally as perceptive.

a round and round walk

the bare trees of March:
fallen leaves on a forest floor
wild mushroom spore
a crouching sphinx
a frightened fawn
an old abandoned door;
one phallic nose whose breath
plays with the chill of dawn.
a piece of hemlock branch
where i rested for a drink:
an articulating rock
squeezed by certainty and chance
and a golden eagle overhead wondering what i think
as i experiment
with silly primeval avian calls.
a natural figure comes to mind
wearing testicular eyeballs
while i maneuver over
powerful mountain streams,
much darker than i ever remembered
in my dreams.